European Software

Rea­ding that the Ger­man For­eign Minis­try is about to chan­ge their com­pu­ting desk­tops back from a GNU/­Li­nux-based sys­tem to Micro­soft Win­dows and their Office offe­rings, a thing that has been on my mind for a while comes back again.
I think it would be very worthwhile to start an initia­ti­ve to fos­ter european soft­ware; I think that whe­re­ver soft­ware pro­du­ced in euro­pe is avail­ab­le, it should be favo­r­ed over other pro­duc­ts. The­re are european ope­ra­ting sys­tem ven­dors – espe­ci­al­ly in the GNU/Linux are­na. Why are they not get­ting the money, but rather the big ven­dor from Red­mont?
The­re also is the point that I think par­ti­cu­lar­ly for sen­si­ti­ve infor­ma­ti­on, an ope­ra­ting sys­tem whe­re the code can be audi­ted and traced is a good idea. I am not sure that you should be trus­ting the ope­ra­ti­ons of a high­ly sen­si­ti­ve net­work to a com­pa­ny that is not all trans­pa­rent about it moti­ves, or its poten­ti­al con­nec­tions to the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty in its home coun­try.
I think that stra­te­gic invest­ments would also do won­ders to sti­mu­la­te activi­ty in the soft­ware mar­ket. Working towards the goal of ero­ding Microsoft’s domi­nan­ce would be a good thing in my book. Con­si­de­ring that the­re have been many pushes towards fos­te­ring some­thing like a european (or ger­man, or bri­tish or …) Sili­con Val­ley, this could just be the way to get the european soft­ware indus­try to focus on pro­vi­ding com­pe­ti­ti­ve offe­rings for basic func­tio­n­a­li­ty like office and desk­top ope­ra­ting sys­tems.